Friday, May 31, 2013

The CHE puzzle returns 6/7; the publication runs biweekly in the summer. The lack of a puzzle this week didn’t stop some yob from assigning it a 1-star rating before I deleted the ratings link. Some people!

Josh Knapp’s New York Times crossword

NY Times crossword solution, 5 31 13, no. 0531

My brain is depleted. I think I watched too much of the Scripps spelling bee today. Good thing this puzzle was so easy for a themeless. I had to spend maybe 20-25 seconds looking for a typo (duh, it’s GAME OVER, not GAME EVER) and still finished in under 4 minutes. Certainly not par for the Friday NYT course.

Most mysterious clue: 34d. [Shout repeated at a basketball game], TWO. We’ve been discussing this elsewhere, and nobody has any idea what this is supposed to be. Who says that? Why do they say it? What does it mean? Is it a Northern thing?

Worst fill: The partials ON IT and SON-IN– are as bad as it gets. Really smooth fill, and it’s not even 72 words, it’s 68.

OK, folks, I’m going to need some help with this one. All I see are four women singers (the “of note” in the title referring to a musical note):

CrosSynergy / Washington Post crossword solution – 05/31/13

[Woman of note #1] clues ELLA FITZGERALD – Queen of Jazz and of clues for the common crossword entry SCAT

[Woman of note #2] clues WHITNEY HOUSTON – the arc of her career is the stuff of a Greek tragedy

[Woman of note #3] is KAREN CARPENTER – another tormented soul who died of severe anorexia, as I recall

[Woman of note #4] is ARETHA FRANKLIN – the Queen of Soul, who is happily still among us

It’s hard for me to believe that the entire theme is just four female singers whose names are 14 letters. I played with the idea that the last names of each singer are shared by other famous (“of note”) people in the world of literature–F. Scott Fitzgerald for Ella, for instance. Or statesmen, with Ben Franklin and Aretha and Sam Houston for Whitney. Something like that should be hinted at in the clues though, and I kept expecting to find some short revealing entry as I solved. Twasn’t to be, so discerning solvers, please clue me in!

Funny to see the word BROODS again, this time clued in its verbal form, [Sulks]. But my FAVE was to see one of my favorite childhood authors E.B. WHITE in the grid. REOIL ([Add more lubricant to] sounds a bit contrived, so that’s my UNFAVE entry today. So long to the merry month of May!

Sjoe! Took a lot of staring post-solve to find the HIDDENCAMERAS in veteran collaborators Galgiardo and Burnikel’s puzzle. Each of the other three answers has the name of a company that makes cameras concealed within it. I’d put all three theme answers at a themeless-seed-word quality, which is what really impressed me with this puzzle! It’s hard to come up with answers concealing long strings of letters so this is no mean feat! Notwithstanding my inability to see the theme, I still found it strange to have a straight theme on Friday after a wordplay theme on a Thursday. Strange, but not bad. I like it when things are unpredictable! The theme answers are:

Similar arrangement of theme answers to yesterday: rows 4, 7, 9, and 12. Today’s grid, however, is a themeless-stand 72-word arrangement. A risky conceit, but I think DonCC pulled it off nicely! There are some nice longer answers: HULAHOOP, NITROGEN, and EBONIES (which are tinkled less than ivories for some reason?) plus a passel of sixes!

There are also some personal touches from expat CC: her native CHINA ISRED. There’s more red in the form of MARS (the supposed red planet) and in the same corner another (dwarf) planet PLUTO. There’s a third (!) mini-theme in the top-right corner: BRONZE and TAN share the clue [Shade at the beach]. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention ENO. His oeuvre was thoroughly (well reasonably thoroughly, his work with David Bowie was left out, I think?) covered in the comments earlier this week. I hope that means today’s clue was a gimme for everybody!

Base phrases have the letters C-A-R appended to their front ends, literally having an “auto” mated to their bodies. I might have titled this one “Autonomic Fixation,” but that’s neither here nor there.

23a. [Stand for a set of hieroglyphic amulets?] (CAR)TOUCHES BASE. Kind of awkward to open the proceedings with a word that I suspect many may not be familiar with, in plural form no less.

34a. [“O frabjous day!” and the like] (CAR)ROLL CALL.

43a. [“Find the Seed” in a rye bread bakery?] (CAR)AWAY GAME. The seed? As in, only one? Among all the loaves?Okay, wait, perhaps it’s like a French drop. Yes, I can see that.

Cohesive theme, literally again, though it shows some wear and tear by the end. A possible downside with a theme like this—or upside, depending on the puzzle’s difficulty and the solver’s proclivities—is that once the mechanism is grasped, a bunch of “free” squares are given away.

The grid lacks long non-theme entries, which should result in fewer compromises toward junky fill as a nearly unavoidable counterbalance. I solved this puzzle late last night while rather sleepy (or at least distracted), and don’t recall whether this was the case. Hours later, this morning, I’ll say it was neither remarkable nor unremarkable (echoes of “neither here nor there”).

I agree with Huda on the NYT, no way four minutes for me! I had the NE corner early, then had to come back at the end of the day. Loved 53a — Hood’s support — when I finally got it, MERRY MEN. Also 16a, Start of a court display, EXHIBIT A, and THE CAN for 55a Stir. Clever cluing!

I watch basketball and go to games all the time and have never heard TWO chanted, but here’s what I think…
The opposing team hits a shot from somewhere right on the 3 point line. They either give them the 3 points or debate the play, so you shout, “TWO, TWO!” Hoping the enemy gets the fewer points.

I found it mostly easy, but I ended up being only slightly faster than normal; I struggled in the top-left: I was duped by the clue for EXHIBITA, didn’t know WEISS (the fantasy author yes) and was leery of AGENDA, MAXOUT and IMHURT. I took them out and put them back a few times. A clean puzzle with fun answers. I don’t know what more anyone could want in a puzzle…

The only answers that kept me from my regular Friday times were the mystifying TWO (even watching basketball, I still have no idea about this one), and SLUSH, which was simply a knowledge gap as I hadn’t heard that meaning before. Pretty smooth puzzle.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention ENO. His oeuvre was thoroughly (well reasonably thoroughly, his work with David Bowie was left out, I think?) covered in the comments earlier this week.

Actually, I did mention that in a comment that day.

CS:
• 10d [Comatose, chemically] INERT / 62d [Unconscious state] COMA – What’s up with that?
• 41d [Singer of the 1984 hit “99 Luftballons”] NENA; would have been better to have clued this referencing the band (same name, like Sade), so as to avoid a perceived overlap with the theme, such as it is.

Hi, I’m thinking the “two” shouted at a bball game should be “tre”, which is shouted frequently re the 3 point shot. My college son plays bball, I hear “tre” shouted , have never ever heard ” two” shouted unless I’m ordering beer. :)

I have never heard TWO shouted at a basketball game. I cannot imagine TWO being shouted in professional basketball in connection with foul shots as the pros get either one or two by rule, so shouting won’t help.

I could imagine yelling TWO in connection with someone at or near the three point line, but the refs now review such shots.

The only thing that makes sense that might occasion a shout is FLAGRANT-1 or FLAGRANT-2, such as probably should have occurred last night when the Birdman “bumped” Hansborough.

FLAGRANT-2 results in the immediate ejection of the offender. I can imagine a home crowd yelling TWO, TWO, TWO when an opponent commits a flagrant foul.

I had attended some New Jersey Nets games back in the day, when there were so few fans that just about *anything* said loudly could be heard by fans and players alike. I mean, you could hear the refs talking to the players, and the players laughing on the bench at comments directed to them from the stands. If you couldn’t hear “TWO” shouted there, I doubt it’s that common.
Now “THREE” for 3-pointers, yes. (Either to encourage the shooter, or to cheer the 3-point shot made).

On a sidebar, sports nerd that I am, I toggled back and forth between the spelling bee and the basketball game while tutoring a student who was doing a test.

I tutor a lot of Indian from India students. One of the parents told me that there is a word in an Indian dialect that refers to overloading the brain with too much “knowledge,” a criticism labeled by perhaps jealous parents at those young kids who compete in spelling and geography bees, or perhaps both. I have always thought that the pursuit of excellence is its own reward and prepares you very well for life, but some consider such pursuits as overly obsessive.

This could either apply to points or free throws, or both. The word “repeated” does not necessarily mean consecutive. If the word is said more than once during a basketball game, it is repeated. And I can assure eveyone that the word is always repeated at every basketball game, whether in the context of declaring an attempted three point shot worth only two or that a foul was committed in the act of shooting and the fouled player is awarded two shots. The referee tells this to the scoring table for the official scorer. Often the ref will hold up two fingers as he/she(?) is saying it. Whatever the fans might shout is irrelevant.

Sometimes nerds can overthink things. We had nerds in our fraternity back in my college days who would design our Homecoming floats and they never worked as the tech students intended.

@Dave: I’m with you. Trying to figure out the notes. Hmmm… Ben FRANKLIN is on a note. Then I reached… John FITZGERALD Kennedy is on a, um, a coin. Maybe it’s what @Pannonica says: Theme just is, such as it is. Sigh.

JanglerNPL, thanks very much for the info about the summer schedule for the Chronicle puzzles. I enjoy them a lot, and I get frustrated when I expect one and it’s not there (like this week). Now I can check that off my list and move on to other frustrations.